Part1: Privacy Talk with Maksim Karliuk, Research specialist at International Development Law Organization: What was your experience at the United Nations and UNESCO?
“This interview has been recorded on 18 March 2024 and discusses international organizations, law, technology and ethics”
This interview outline:
- Why did you start to work in the public sector?
- What was your experience at the United Nations and UNESCO?
Kohei: Hello, everyone! Thank you for joining this interview. I’m so happy to have Maksim today — it’s very good to have a conversation with him. So, Maksim, thank you for joining us today.
Maksim: Glad to be here! Thank you for having me.
Kohei: Thank you. First of all, I would like to introduce his profile.
Maksim Karliuk (LLM and PhD in Law) has more than ten years of working experience at the intersection of law, policy and philosophy. Currently, he is a research specialist at the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) in Rome, where he works to advance peace and sustainable development through the rule of law.
He previously worked as a principal consultant and program specialist at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), taught at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Science Po), and had several other academic engagements around the world. He has been included in the 2021 Santander-CIDOB 35 under 35 list of potential and consolidated minds.
So, Maksim, thank you for joining again today.
Maksim: Thank you very much for inviting me.
Kohei: Awesome, so let’s get started with today’s first agenda item. You have had a variety of great experiences so far. Could you tell us why did you start to work in the public sector?
- Why did you start to work in the public sector?
Maksim: Yes, so initially I was working mostly in academia, mainly doing research work in different research institutions, universities, also doing some teaching in law schools, and basically working on research projects most of the time. But at the same time I wanted to have more real world impact, essentially to apply, to implement my knowledge in practice.
That’s kind of logically led me to join international organizations. So that’s why I ended up working eventually at UNESCO. We will talk about it a bit more, I guess. And now I’m working at the International Development Law Organization, IDLO, based in Rome as you said.
I see academia as a great value. I still like to teach. I like to do research and publications, and I see a lot of value in creating new knowledge. But I also want to see and make sure that this knowledge actually is being implemented in practice.
And I try to do that at a global level. In my view, one of the great ways to do so is through the work of international organizations. Essentially, to make some sort of profound, positive societal change on the ground.
Kohei: That sounds amazing. During your academic career, what did you major in and study at universities, in the academic space?
Maksim: My background is in law, I studied international law and European law. At the same time, I have always been interested in philosophy.
That’s how I went into the field of new technologies and artificial intelligence — because there are lots of philosophical questions there, in particular philosophy of mind, there are lots of discussions of these technologies from that perspective.
So I tried to combine my law background and my interest in philosophy; and that’s the way I transitioned into this field, where I have been working a lot recently.
Kohei: Thank you for sharing. As you have many great experiences in the public sector, such as the United Nations and UNESCO, could you share your experience in these organizations?
- What was your experience at the United Nations and UNESCO?
Maksim: Yes, definitely. Look, that was a lot of intense work, but fun at the same time, very exciting. It’s been a great learning experience as well. And of course, there are some really amazing people that I have met, who work there.
UNESCO, which is a UN system agency, is a big organization itself. You can tell from the name — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — it deals with quite a few topics, and in fact, with time has developed its areas even wider.
One of the main things that’s unique about this particular organization is its mandate in ethics, which it has within the United Nations system.
Combined with its work in science and technology, UNESCO received the mandate to develop the first global normative instrument in the field of artificial intelligence ethics, which has been a huge task due to the novelty of this topic.
（Movie: Gabriela Ramos on how to build the rule of law in the digital world (long version)）
And we had to do it essentially in two years, which is unheard of if you compare to previous global normative instruments developed by the organization previously, and given that, in the end, there are 193 states who are involved in it.
These are some of the reasons why the work was so intense. But also I was hired as a principal consultant on the ethics of AI at the very start of the process, at the beginning of 2020 and moved to Paris right before the pandemic.
That’s another reason why it was intense, because the pandemic basically slowed down all the processes very much. Some people didn’t even believe that we would manage to deliver, but we did.
My consultancy was for six months, initially, and then I was offered to stay as a staff member, which I did, and I stayed until the normative instrument was adopted on November 21 in 2021.
These 193 member states of UNESCO signed the Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, and it became the first global normative instrument in this domain.
It was a great experience to help in developing such a major document from its inception to adoption and start of the implementation. It was a chance to work with major world experts, because we had experts from all over the world, from different backgrounds, from different cultures, different experiences.
There was also an amazing experience of participating in interstate negotiations, because you have states as diverse as, let’s say, European Union member states and China, for example, and you have to somehow reconcile sometimes really polar views on these issues among them. It was really a huge learning experience. Overall, I learned a lot, I got many new skills.
Another thing, because I mentioned that I studied international law previously, it was also interesting to experience international law and law of international organizations in practice, how people work in this institution, how they perceive their role, interrelations of the organization with the member states. Which in practice, quite often is different from the theory that I studied in particular in the law school.
This also gave me lots of new ways to understand how things work in practice. Going back to the initial point I was making, why I went into into the public sector, into international organizations — academic theories are great, it’s one thing.
But it’s also important to see how it is actually done in practice, which sometimes is not the same thing. So it’s good to have this experience on both sides in order to deliver effective tools to address the issues you are working on.
Overall, the experience was great, and I know that people there work intensively now, and the team I previously worked with is working actively in implementing this normative instrument to make sure that it happens on the ground.
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